A Voyage of Discovery

"What do you mean that we have discovered a terrestrial planet on the outer edge of Alpha Centauri B's habitable zone?" Cooper asked. "You're joking, right? "

"No, I'm not," Simmons replied. "Coop, come up to meeting room four. Duflot wants to brief the entire command staff with the information that we have collected so far."

"I'll be there in five."

"I will meet you there."

Cooper all but hopped into her fatigues. She had been reading a novel on her portable in her quarters, so she had been relaxing in a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt. 'I have to be in uniform if I am going to meet with Duflot,' She thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. There, the youthful first officer ran a comb through her dark brown hair. Then she double checked the light eye makeup that matched her bright green eyes. "Let's go," she murmured as she rushed off to the meeting room.

Discovering potential planets was an important part of the Hope mission. They had spent weeks observing Alpha Centauri's B's rotation, so they knew where the star's plane of reference was. By using this information, Hope's scientists had a good idea of where to look for planets.

'The problem is that space is just so huge,' she thought as she hurried to the meeting room. 'I wonder if this is the only planet orbiting this star. Since it is in the star's goldilocks zone, it makes the discovery even more exciting.'

Once Cooper arrived at meeting room four, she found both Captain Simmons and Rear Admiral Duflot were waiting for her. "Where is everyone else?" she asked as she took an empty seat at the room's large table.

"They are on their way," Simmons reported.

Simmons was as tall as ever, with his brown hair and soft blue eyes. Meanwhile, the blonde-haired and green eyed Duflot was rather short in comparison. To be brutally honest, the rear admiral had a bit of a complex about his height, so no-one brought it up within his earshot.

Both of the youthful-looking men were wearing their Britanian fatigues just as Cooper was. However, when Anderson entered, she was wearing the Greater United States of the Americas' fatigues. When Kobayoshi and Watanabe arrived, they were wearing the fatigues of the Empire of Nippon.

'You can tell that this is an Alliance mission just by looking at how people dress,' Cooper thought while she was waiting for Duflot to begin his briefing.

"Since everyone is here, let us begin."

"As all of you are undoubtedly aware, the science division has found a planet on the outskirts of Alpha Centauri B's habitable zone. The reason that we discovered it so quickly is due to the planet's high albedo. Initial spectrography indicates that hydrogen of some sort is present, either on the surface or in the atmosphere. The science division also believes that the hydrogen they have detected is in the form of water ice covering most of the planet's surface. That would also explain the planet's high albedo."

"From this distance the planet seems to be roughly the size of Earth and the scientists are currently researching the rotational speed of the planet. Current rough estimates put it somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five hours."

"We will change course momentarily in order to get a closeup view of the planet. Getting there will take us a few months at one half gee of acceleration."

"In the meantime, the people in the science division will be very busy making observations, so please don't disturb them unless absolutely necessary. I will keep all of you posted as more information becomes available. For now, I want to keep this information under wraps until I tell you otherwise."

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"So Duflot's World is essentially a slush ball Earth?" Cooper asked, referring to a theory that Earth had gone through similar phases in its long history.